Does having affiliates hurt seo?
-
one of my clients has a TON of affiliates out there building links back to his site all with the ?ref=AFFILIATENAME tracking string
does google understand this and not count these links or is there a way to nofollow all links with this tracking string?
just wondering how big companies rank well and still have thousands of affiliates building links on all kinds of properties using all kinds of methods
thanks
-
i doubt google could ever do anything about it because so many legit sites get 50%+ of their business from their affiliates
Bit of an over-estimation, but 2 years ago I would have agreed that they wouldn't do it. Today I'm less sure.
-
thanks mat
i doubt google could ever do anything about it because so many legit sites get 50%+ of their business from their affiliates - and seems like every website has a banner of some sort linking to another site as an affiliate so i think a large percentage of the actual internet is affiliate marketing based
im sure more sites exist for the sole purpose of making an affiliate buck than actual company sites - literally every blog makes money as an affiliate in some manner or another
but thanks for the answer - i will do the site: search now
-
I don't believe that affiliate links in themselves cause issues on a technical level. However lots of links with ref=affiliatename could potentially cause a canonicalisation issue is they have not been redirected properly. A quick search to see if any have been indexed (site:sitename.com inurl:ref=) will tel you.
Assuming that is OK you should be fine. It is worth remembering that you cannot nofollow incoming links anyway. You would need to get the sites to nofollow the links as it is done in the source of the link.
However... strictly speaking affiliate links are paid links. Google rules state paid links should be nofollowed. Affiliate links don't usually seem to be no-follow (even the aff networks don't add the nofollow attribute in the code they provide), however they probably should be. Google could well crack down on this at some point.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Comparison of affiliate marketing programs
Looking for a comparison of major affiliate marketing programs (Amazon Associates vs Commission Junction). Can someone point me in the right direction?
Affiliate Marketing | | nicole.healthline0 -
Affiliate Marketing in Australia
Hello Guys My website is BannerBuzz.com.au I'm Looking for Best Affiliate Marketing Websites In Australia and I've Researched and found the following Websites for the same. http://www.clixgalore.com.au/
Affiliate Marketing | | CommercePundit
http://www.jackmedia.com/
http://www.commissionfactory.com.au/ So I Need your valuable opinions on which website I can get maximum exposure in Affiliate Marketing. Please Suggest. Thanks in Advance. Thanks Prabhakar0 -
SEO Implications For a Technical Functionality Fix
Our Magento based affiliate extension is not working, due to a conflict with the Varnish caching system. Varnish has a known bug which does not allow multiple cookies to be set. Our workaround involves redirecting any request with the affiliate tracking parameter to the HTTPS version of the site. Varnish does not run on HTTPs and therefore our affiliate cookie will be set. Note: the main content of our site runs on HTTP. My SEO concern is how to handle this for the search engines. We have a few things to consider: Redirect: Should we use a 301 or 302? Canonical: It seems to make sense to include a canonical on the HTTP version of the site without the affiliate tracking parameter - right? Robots Meta Tags: "noindex, follow" or "index, follow" Am I missing something? Thanks for your time and consideration!
Affiliate Marketing | | 19prince0 -
Affiliate marketing: yes or no?
Hello, A colleague recently asked me about affiliate marketing for our clients, and my answer for a few years now has been emphatically "no", because I had not seen it done in positive way. How does everyone weigh in affiliate marketing, and what companies and/or software would you suggest? For example, is http://www.admedia.com/ a reputable source? I see lots of bad reviews on these guys. Any thoughts, suggestions, etc would be extremely valuable. Thanks in advance!
Affiliate Marketing | | lfrazer0 -
How to flag inbound affiliate links to Search Engines
Afternoon Mozzers, I was chatting to our VP of marketing earlier about one of our sites with a somewhat unhealthy looking link profile. This is primarily caused by the sector its in and the fact that lots of low quality lead generators / affiliates operate there, sending traffic to us in return for payment on accepted leads. Now, he recalled that there is a way to mark these inbound links, through a URL parameter he thought, as being affiliates and therefore should be ignored as we don’t want them misinterpreted as an attempt to manipulate our rankings. I have been doing a spot of research but can't find a straight answer. heres a few articles i looked at: blogaid, Yoast, Webmaster world and the Moz Q&A.The problem is all these are from the perspective of a site linking out and acting as an affiliate, so all deal with that page not losing PR. The two methods i have derived from this boil down to: No follow the links Use an intermediary redirect page and script which you can block from robots.txt So, back to our case - Are there any ways we can signal to Search engines, as the destination site, that these links are from affiliates (such as this URL parameter our VP had vague recollections off) or should i just get in touch and ask the sites to make them Nofollow? Thanks, Tom.
Affiliate Marketing | | Sarbs0 -
Where can I find best resources for Affiliate Marketing?
Any suggestion for Affiliate training, forums, seminars, etc. for newbie? I'm doing my research but would like to hear from pros. I'm experienced web developer and Adsense publisher, now want to step in the world of affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing | | webplex0 -
How should I deal with the affiliate URLs we create through our affiliate program?
Our website offers an affiliate program and every affiliate gets a link http://www.ourwebsite.com/?affiliateID. Because we get many such links we use redirects to avoid duplicate content. Unfortunately we have 302 redirects set up and I want to make them 301. Many of our affiliates build backlinks using their http://www.ourwebsite.com/?affiliateID as the URL. If such links were redirected through a 301, would they pass any juice? Can our site get penalized by search engines for having backlinks to URLs that contain affiliate IDs, URLs that are 301 redirected to our homepage lets say?
Affiliate Marketing | | nick.leech0 -
In search of the perfect SEO affiliate ID'd URL
Hi, I'm building an affiliate system for our website, and I obviously want to gain as much SEO benifit from it as possible. So I am wondering what the optimal solution is with regard to how an affilaite URL is tagged. After looking into it a bit more - I have come up with the following. 1/. Use an affilaite URL idendifier with a #
Affiliate Marketing | | James77
EG like www.mysite.com#123 2/. 301 redirect the affilaite URL to the "real URL"
EG www.mysite.com#123 301 -> www.mysite.com What do you think of this? Thanks0